Sibling in the context of "Human bonding"

In anthropology, kinship is the web of social relationships that form an important part of the lives of all humans in all societies, although its exact meanings even within this discipline are often debated. Anthropologist Robin Fox says that the study of kinship is the study of what humans do with these basic facts of life – mating, gestation, parenthood, socialization, siblingship etc. Human society is unique, he argues, in that we are "working with the same raw material as exists in the animal world, but [we] can conceptualize and categorize it to serve social ends." These social ends include the socialization of children and the formation of basic economic, political and religious groups.

Kinship can refer both to the patterns of social relationships themselves, or it can refer to the study of the patterns of social relationships in one or more human cultures (i.e. kinship studies). Over its history, anthropology has developed a number of related concepts and terms in the study of kinship, such as descent, descent group, lineage, affinity/affine, consanguinity/cognate and fictive kinship. Further, even within these two broad usages of the term, there are different theoretical approaches.

In the lineal kinship system used in the English-speaking world, a niece or nephew is a child of an individual's sibling or sibling-in-law. A niece is female and a nephew is male, and they would call their parents' siblings aunt or uncle. The gender-neutral term nibling has been used in place of the common terms, especially in specialist literature.

As aunt/uncle and niece/nephew are separated by one generation, they are an example of a second-degree relationship. Unless related by marriage, they are 25% or more related by blood if the aunt/uncle is a full sibling of one of the parents, or 12.5% if they are a half-sibling.

An aunt is a female individual who is a sibling of a parent or married to a sibling of a parent. Aunts who are related by birth are second-degree relatives. Alternate terms include auntie or aunty.

Aunt, auntie, and aunty also may be titles bestowed by parents and children to close friends of one or both parents who assume a sustained caring or nurturing role for the children. Children in some cultures and families may refer to the cousins of their parents as aunt or uncle due to the age and generation gap. The word comes from Latin: amita via Old French ante and is a family relationship within an extended or immediate family.

Sir Humphrey Gilbert (c. 1539 – 9 September 1583) was an English adventurer, explorer, member of parliament and soldier who served during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and was a pioneer of the English colonial empire in North America and the Plantations of Ireland. He was a maternal half-brother of Sir Walter Raleigh and a cousin of Sir Richard Grenville.

The consort kin or outer kins (Chinese: 外戚; pinyin: wàiqì) were the kin or a group of people related to an empress dowager or a consort of a monarch or a warlord in the Sinosphere. The leading figure of the clan was either a (usually male) sibling, cousin, or parent of the empress dowager or consort.

While Consort kins can be seen as a manifestation of nepotism in Sinospheric imperial politics, it is a moot point in a system of where most political positions were inherited via male primogeniture. Majority of the criticism lobbied against consort kins comes from the Confucians gentry class, who were often their political rival. In certain periods of Chinese political history, i.e. Reign of Emperor Wu of Western Jin Dynasty, consort kins were empowered by emperors to create political balance or to garner support for policies or actions unpopular among the Confucian elites. In other cases, emperors at the beginning of their reign, often relied on their consort kins to hold onto power, because they lack of the political network a more established ruler may have.

A sibling-in-law is the spouse of one's sibling, the sibling of one’s spouse, or the spouse of one's spouse's sibling. In Indian English the latter can be referred to as a co-sibling (specifically a co-sister, for the wife of one's sibling-in-law, or co-brother, for the husband of one's sibling-in-law).

More commonly, a sibling-in-law is referred to as a brother-in-law for a male sibling-in-law and a sister-in-law for a female sibling-in-law.

A political family (also referred to as a political dynasty) is a family in which multiple members are involved in politics, particularly electoral politics. Members may be related by blood or marriage; often several generations or multiple siblings may be involved.

A royal family or dynasty in a monarchy is generally not considered a "political family," although later descendants of a royal family have played political roles in a republic (such as the Arslan family of Lebanon). A family dictatorship is a form of hereditary dictatorship that operates much like an absolute monarchy, yet occurs in a nominally non-monarchic state.